Running the foggy twists and turns of the “NAFTA Superhighway.”

In David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, which is set in the near future, the United States no longer officially exists.

The Organization of North American Nations, an entity controlled mostly by former U.S. big-business interests and including the former states of Canada and Mexico, has optioned out corporate naming rights to elements of human life as fundamental as time (instead of, say, A.D. 2025, the book begins in the “Year of Glad,” as in Glad the trash bag manufacturer). As broadcaster Lou Dobbs might have it, Wallace wasn’t writing a satire. He had the foresight of a prophet.

Dobbs has led numerous recent segments on his CNN show about what he calls moves by the administration of George W. Bush and counterparts in Canada and Mexico to lead the three countries clandestinely into a future “North American Union,” a superstate into which American sovereignty, Dobbs suggests, will be shoehorned and hence obliterated. As evidence, Dobbs often refers to the construction of something called the “NAFTA Superhighway.”

Owner-operator Maalik Ali, of Demopolis, Ala., says he’s heard it mentioned on XM radio and speculates that it’d be “a big hook-up, up north to Canada and across the country through Texas to Mexico.” He says Dobbs might be referring to I-69, which extends today from Port Huron, Mich., all the way to Indianapolis, Ind. Plans are in various stages from southern Indiana to Texas to extend that interstate all the way to Laredo. “That’ll be a gigantic highway,” Ali says, “when they get done with it.”

But he adds that he thinks the term also might work as a reference to I-5, which runs from the United States’ southern border outside San Diego through California, Oregon and Washington.